PROVIDENCE – Tizra Inc. this morning announced that its Agile PDF publication service will be used by Duke University Press “to repackage, deliver and sell their book-based content” via a hosted online service.

“Our readers are a diverse audience of scholars and educated readers,” said Stephen Cohn, director of the Duke Press. “We expect that Tizra’s innovative system will, over time, allow many new readers to discover our content,” Cohn said, “as well as allow us to deliver new mix-and-match capabilities to those who already view our publications as crucial for research, teaching and intellectual stimulation.”

The press – the publishing arm of Duke University – ranks among the top 5 university publishing houses nationwide for periodicals, with more than 30 journals, and among the top 20 for the number of books published, producing about 120 titles per year.

“Agile PDF simplifies the management of a branded publication site just the way blogging software simplified personal homepages, delivering [Portable Document Format] content that was originally developed for print to readers with the ease and familiarity of a custom-designed HTML Web site,” said Tizra CEO David Durand.

The service will enable Duke to create and manage a fully searchable online store where buyers can purchase full books, individual chapters or pages, or collections combining multiple works, Tizra said.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but company spokesman Andy Cutler did confirm that Duke was Tizra’s first paying customer. “The company is in active negotiations with other possible clients at this point in time,” he added, in an e-mail interview. “The Duke University Press deal certainly will serve as a validating event in those other discussions.”

The East Side software startup began beta testing early this year, helping organizations to repackage and sell selected content from their previously unwieldy PDF libraries. (READ MORE)

“Duke University Press holds a leadership position among university presses in applying technology to scholarly communication,” Durand said. “We are delighted have them as a charter customer, and to have the opportunity to help them deliver content with such enduring value.

“We think that Tizra’s on-demand platform offers advantages to publishers who want a partner to help them get online, without being subsumed into a single iTunes-style marketplace that limits control of product definition and branding.”

Tizra Inc. is a software-development startup focusing on online publishing technology whose investors include the quasi-public Slater Technology Fund. Additional information is available at www.tizra.com.

For more information about the Duke University Press, visit www.dukeupress.edu